Many types of businesses, political and charitable activities require extensive telephone contact with a very large number of people. It is been found that an individual operator working to place calls with a coventional telephone can make successful contacts only at a relatively slow rate. For a substantial percentage of the calls that are placed the phones are either busy or there is no answer. Thus, a large part of the operator's time is spent on nonproductive work. A number of devices have been developed to aid an operator or to automate the calling process. Such devices are shown, for example, in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,001,508, 3,999,017, 3,445,601, 3,274,346, 3,943,289, 4,160,125, 4,201,896, 4,438,296, 3,072,746, 3,989,899 and 3,407,269.
These pre-existing devices typically provide automatic dialing of a predetermined group of numbers. However, this still leaves a substantial workload for the operator in addition to the truly productive time which is the actual conversation with the called party. When particular information is required in regard to the called party, such as in debt collection services, the operator must have a substantial amount of information concerning the party. The storage and physical handling of a large bulk of such information is wasteful of operator productivity.
In view of the requirements for large volume dialing with operator contact and maximum operator utilization, there is a need for a method and apparatus to provide operators with fully connected calls together with the required file information for a called party in such a rapid and flexible manner that a large number of operators can be kept busy at the most productive tasks in telephone calls.